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Pluto square Pluto

the transiting Pluto's passage in square to its own natal place, or one person's Pluto square another's in synastry

What the tradition reads

A natal chart cannot show Pluto square itself, since a single body cannot stand at an angle from its own degree; the tradition instead reads this key through transit, a station reached roughly a quarter of the way through Pluto's own approximately two hundred and forty eight year circuit. Cafe Astrology's transit reading describes this longer-term passage as one shared, in its timing, with others born in the same and surrounding years, grappling with a person's own sense of meaning or purpose, one's role in life, questions of mortality, and one's current attachments, with current events prompting a person to question what they have been doing in these areas and to shed whatever attitudes, ambitions, fears or attachments have limited their growth. Between two charts, a square from one person's Pluto to another's is read through the same transformative character the tradition gives Pluto generally, but at odds rather than in step: one partner's drive to transform unsettles the other's sense of control, rather than reinforcing it; because Pluto moves so slowly, a real difference in age between the two partners is needed to produce this angle between two separate natal charts at all.

The story

A square is ninety degrees, a quarter of the circle, one of the four configurations Ptolemy names; Ptolemy's chapter on the mutual configuration of the signs calls it, together with the opposition, discordant, and Wikipedia's own summary places the square among the hard aspects, crediting it with a strong and usable tension, a turning point where an important decision is needed, often at some cost. Hades meeting Hades has no myth of doubling to draw on. The tradition instead reads the pairing through the god's two names and natures: Hades, portrayed in the older stories as the dark and violent abductor of Persephone, with few temples of his own, and Plouton, the name that came into wide use at Eleusis, where the same god was venerated as both a stern ruler and a loving husband to Persephone, and, since the Greeks connected mineral wealth found underground with the same chthonic power, as a god of the earth's buried riches too. Pluto meeting its own natal place at this harder angle is read through the same transformative character the myth gives Hades and Plouton together, questions of mortality and purpose surfacing whether or not they are welcome.

Written from

Corpus key aspect:Pluto:Pluto:square.